KEY POINTS:
Inorganic rubbish month wouldn't be the same without complaints about illegal dumpers and scavengers, and dark hints from city hall that this might be the last.
Auckland City, we're told, is considering alternatives such as vouchers for the local tip or setting up a resource recovery park. I hope the study gets no further than usual.
Four years ago, council officials were very taken by the success of Christchurch's SuperShed scheme, a resource recovery "bring and buy" set-up where you drop off your useable discards, and, if you're not determinedly single-minded, depart with someone else's junk.
In the end though, change was shelved and we were allowed to continue the time-honoured tradition of dumping our junk on the nearest grass verge to await the scavengers and the council collectors. As a method of getting rid of "large" household rubbish, it has the great advantage of being convenient for most residents, to say nothing of the added bonus, to me at least, of knocking the hay paddock which is my grass verge at this time of year, into submission.
The continuous midden of Avondale junk pictured in yesterday's Herald made me quite nostalgic for the inorganic rubbish piles in the Ponsonby-Herne Bay streets of yore.
Those were the days when the old villas around my way were still low-cost renters, or in the throes of restoration; a time when we could have easily matched the Avondale mess. But as the area gentrified, so has our inorganic rubbish become more refined, and more neatly displayed - until the scavengers strike at least. Our discards now tend to be still working.
The other change is we're better behaved. Last month when we got the two-week alert from the council telling us not to start discarding until the weekend before collection day, we did as we were told.
By Saturday afternoon when I ventured out with my modest pile, I was first in the street and almost got bowled over by the rush of scavengers who'd been cruising up and down the streets searching in vain for stuff to rummage through.
Out in the wilder west though, they don't seem to have read the council advisory leaflet as carefully. Either that, or the rubbish collectors were over-optimistic in calculating the area it could collect in a week. But the rule of thumb seems to have been to put their rubbish out early and often.
And it only takes one person to jump the gun and everyone is rushing to put their junk out too. Then it sits and festers, giving people from other areas and cities the opportunity to take advantage of the chaos and slip in to deposit their junk as well.
The obvious solution seems to be to educate people in "problem areas" to be patient and to wait their turn. On the other hand it might be simpler for the city council to target the areas with a record of poor self-control, for early pick-ups.
What we can't let happen is for the inorganic collection to be replaced by free vouchers to the tip, or a SuperShed scheme. I'm not against either concept, particularly the second which sounds an ideal way of passing on, for example, old electronic and computer equipment. But you only have to drive along a street on collection day to appreciate the service being provided.
The inorganic collection guarantees we all live in cleaner, safer neighbourhoods. The piles of old mattresses and tyres and other junk that briefly clutter the footpaths, came from under houses, and backyard rubbish heaps.
This waste material is potential fuel for house fires and nesting material of vermin. Having just killed off my first furry autumn visitor to my ceiling, I'm a great supporter of anything that helps keeps these pests at bay. Living in a street of tightly packed old villas, I'm also for anything that lessens the neighbourhood fire risk.
For both the above reasons, making the disposal of rubbish as easy as possible seems an eminently sensible community activity.
Between mid-February and the end of June, the contractors, Alpha Refuse Collections, will have collected an estimated 13,000 tonnes of inorganic waste from Auckland City households, at a cost of $2,357,100.
This is 13,000 tonnes that would otherwise be rotting away in backyards or being tossed down gullies. The existing system works. Why toss it out?
